How to keep your design files neat and tidy

I’m an organizational freak. Organizational freaks like to keep things in order, so they’re easier to understand, sort through and manage. This includes small stuff, like grid-based furniture layout and more important decisions like color-coding spices.

You’ll know more about how we think if you visit this website. But if you think being too organized is not a good thing, being unorganized is probably worse. Especially when it comes to finding and managing your project files.

Why you need a filing system

If you’ve been without a filing system so far, you might feel comfortable dumping your design files into a folder and finding ways to sort through them later. Some people even enjoy the creative freedom that comes with this file-pile approach. But however you feel about this topic will not change the fact that having a good filing system provides some pretty good benefits:

You’ll design better. Every time you spend more than 30 seconds searching for a file, you interrupt your natural flow of creativity and stress starts to creep in. It goes without saying what this does to your inspiration and work.

You’ll restore a sense of control over your work. Putting things in order, however small they may be, gives you a nice feeling that you’re the boss in the house (or the hard drive). This will spread onto your work and you’ll be more confident about your design decisions too.

You’ll learn a valuable design lesson. Design is all about putting the right things in the right place, in proper order. In other words, it’s about making sense out of seemingly separate pieces. You can use this kind of thinking to design logos, websites, cars, music, elevators or filing systems. Design is about organization and structure, and far from being only visual. Here’s a great book on that.

While any filing system is better than none, some approaches work better for designers than others. Here is the one I personally use and it works great for a large number of different projects.

The 6-step filing system that works

1. Make sure you have a Work folder

2. Create client folders

3. Create project folders

4. Create filing folders

Client input: This is everything I get from the client during the course of the project. Files, documents, notes… you name it.

Business: Project quotes, estimates, schedules, proposals and everything else related to the “business” part of the project.

Assets: Photos, vectors, icons and other design elements you use to put together your designs. In other words, everything that is a part of your final layout should go here.

Design: The name says it all. Here’s where you keep your actual design files, the stuff you work on. Typically, it should contain nothing else but a list of files with your designs in various versions or revision stages. Remember, all files used to construct those designs, like photos or icons, should go into the Assets folder.

Production: All final files for delivery to the client. For print projects, this is where you place your prepress files which can be sent to the printer, like PDF’s fonts and so on. For web projects, this is where you put the actual HTML version of the site, if you do the coding too.

You may have figured it out by now, but this structure roughly reflects the various stages your project is going through, and files related to those stages. So where will you find that great photo you’ve been using in Halloween poster project? Right, it’s in the Assets folder. How about a file ready for printing? Of course, in the Production folder.

5. Save changes as separate files

Whenever you make changes to any of the files, never save them back over the original. Instead, use “Save as…” command to save them under a new version. This way you’ll keep track of number of changes you make, as well as when you made them. And talking about saving versions….

6. Name your files properly

Brochure Final

Brochure Final – image fix

Brochure Final Final

Brochure Final of all finals – cover page fix

Brochure Final Final Final

Obviously, I had a problem with the meaning of word “Final”, but it was only because I didn’t know that “final” is not a very practical word for file naming — you never really know if something is final or not and neither does your client. The better, and easier way of handling this is by adding a number to the filename whenever you change it or make an alternative version of it, until you get a final approval from the client. So the above list would look as follows:

Brochure_01

Brochure_02

Brochure_03

Brochure_04

Brochure_05

Brochure_06

This way, you always know that the final one is the one with the highest number in the filename, and your client can easily track the changes and variations too. An edge case scenario where this naming system might fail is when your client decides that Brochure_05 is what should be the final, instead of Brochure_06. The workaround is to simply open the file and save it as “Brochure_07”, even if no changes were made, so you don’t have to think about it later.

How do you make sense of files?

Just like people organize their homes in a multitude of ways, they have the same number of ways of organizing their files. The system I described above is not perfect and will not solve all of your dilemmas, but it will get you started and provide a solid framework for finding and managing your files across dozens of projects.

How do you organize your design files?

The author

Peter Vukovic is a seasoned designer & creative director with 10 years of experience in worldwide advertising agency.
He is a proud member of the 99designs community. You can view his 99designs profile here.

Very interesting to peek into how others operates. I do something like that. I have an empty folder named !!NewClient that already has the folder structure that I use then
just copy that for each new client on my computer.

Usually use ! 1 2 3 and 4 to make folders order the way I want.

Also every time I have something that has to do with a date I always use YYYY_MM_DD format in the name so that it sorts it so the new is on bottom and old is on time. A huge time saver.

Very interesting to peek into how others operates. I do something like that. I have an empty folder named !!NewClient that already has the folder structure that I use then
just copy that for each new client on my computer.

Usually use ! 1 2 3 and 4 to make folders order the way I want.

Also every time I have something that has to do with a date I always use YYYY_MM_DD format in the name so that it sorts it so the new is on bottom and old is on time. A huge time saver.

Out of curiosity, how have your strategies changed with the widespread use of cloud storage? I find I may have several iterations of a project in several different places (usually because I am in different stages with different collaborations). What I’d really love (like, sooooo much) is a lightweight versioning system for my graphics files (like Subversion for graphics). I know they exist, but all of the ones I know about are incredibly expensive because (I assume) they are targeted at high-end design firms. An open-source, self-hosted graphics file versioning system would be absolutely wonderful!

Appending file name with _v01, _v02 and so on… (v for version obviously).

Mike

Feb 6 2013

Does v mean version or variation? I’ve found A_01 B_01 works best. The letter gives you your different options, while the number give the revision number. If the client like option B, then the next revision might be B_01. This leaves a nice decision trail so you know when design choices were made.

Andrew

Feb 6 2013

V for Version. I have added alphabetical suffixes before if there’s two slight variations to “Version 1” so I’d have “_v01A” and so on.

You can also adopt the same system used with software programming iterations. I have found this to be very useful when clients want 2 options of an existing design, and then wants 2 options from one of those iterations, etc. It functions just as an index does in long document formatting.

v1.0
v1.1
v1.2
v2.0
v2.1
v2.2
v2.2.1
v2.2.2
v3.0
v3.1
v3.2

In this example, Let’s say the client’s final choice is v2.2.2. From this filename I can always trace right back to where the original design progress came from. It’s the 5th iteration of v2. This is handy when diving back into a client months later for a new project and reviewing their habits in projects prior. My final design folder for this project would look like this…

_old
v2.2.2

I simply stash all old versions in an “_old” folder and keep the one approved out in the open.

EDIT: I operate on Mac Only. To make this system cross OS friendly, replace all periods with a dash. eg. v2.2.2 becomes v2-2-2.

Andrew

Feb 6 2013

This is very helpful!

As an in house designer I only have one company client, but many people within. We actually use online project management that spits out a job number for every project that we do so it’s easy to file everything in that sense:

Proofs – I drop all proofs into an InDesign proofing sheet I created that gives rationale, project specs and “client” info. I keep the InDesign file in here as well as exported PDF files of each round of creative labeled with the suffix “_rd#”

Final – being on a system with a specific clientele in the company our projects actually get “finalized” to an extent so I keep a “Final” folder with production files. And to keep the sanctity of “final” artwork, we actually require our clientele to submit a new request if they ask for changes to an already closed project.

Joys of in-house designing where the company pays my salary, not the clients 🙂

As far as the actual, live, editable artwork whether it’s .AI, .PSD or .INDD, I drop that directly into the project folder, partly out of efficiency – I don’t want to have to click open an extra folder that I don’t need to. File names are a duplicate of the project folder. Spaces are replaced with underscores.

I loved this idea!
It’s imilar to the way I manage my files.
For my personal publishing designs, I also have a file for each year and inside for each month. That way I know when they were published.
I was wondering, what’s the best place to store all photo files? I have a lot of them, and they’re quite heavy. The cloud is difficult for me. Any other recommendations? Specially when I have several people that need access to the same files.

Great article, I think it will be very useful to me in order to become a little more organized.
I have a few questions though:

In the folders naming you say that icons and logos should be in the “Assets” folder… but what if you made the icons?
For example, the project name is “ABC Webdesign” and in the “Design” folder I put all my PSDs but what if I need to make icons for that page? Should I create a “design” folder inside the “assets” folder?

I have another question regarding the file name. When you save several artboards separately in Illustrator, they are automatically named 01, 02, 03… that doesn’t mean they are different versions of the same document but simply different documents.
What kind of turn around do you suggest?

(I hope my post doesn’t sound like criticism, I’m just trying to find a solution to little issues I often encounter 🙂 )

This is where i find Coreldraw miles ahead … Instead of saving each canvas to a file and carefully filing them and going back to the folders and browsing and opening them … Coreldraws multitab architecture enables you have all those variations of your design in a single file !!!